True 20 sounds good in practice, but im worried about the culmitave effects, and the extra die roll. It's much easier to have a constant dilienation of penalties than culmative in players minds, and it's much easier to figure that out round by round, becuase say a long fight with lots of hp it gets hard to figure out the culmative effect, instead of a constant stack round after round, plus its not such a huge penalty that impacts game play, but adds to flavor, which is what we want.

And again, loosing bonuses as your hp goes down sounds good, but end up being a GM tool to punish players. Give them a chance at least before you stack a penalty for it, and be wary of the entire negative bonus, have in your mind a invisible Cap to the negative, no matter which way it goes. And division is never fun, and then theres the do I round up or down debate, which can always get confused at the table and can be exploited.

In the game system pandora, not only will I have the Hope System (HP)
but for thouse who complain about fiddly erasing numbers i'll have a wounds only option.

One of the things that irritates me the most is that no system has this choice. They can't give you more than just one way to do combat, or damage. I am to fix that, and to merge the two into something that the players and gms can agree with. Heck you could run both and have it function effectivly the same.

Quote from: SpikeThe problem, of course, is that a realistic damage system is excessively lethal in most cases, perhaps too much (as people survive all sorts of crazy shit in real life!) and anything too much less lethal often removes drama (potental?) and rationalism far too quickly.

One part of the problem lies in the nature of game combat, the collapsed time frame. Heroes don't miss nearly as often as real life combatants do, of course, and no one wants to play out eight rounds of keystone cops before someone lands a telling blow.  This exaggerates the lethal/unrational design spectrum, but is not easily avoidable.  There are reasons we have characters (and NPC's) hit so often, after all.


My own experiment with this has been to try to integrate 'damage' into the combat system, though primarily for dueling rather than chaotic melees.  One's combat effectiveness degrades as you grow weary and accumulate minor wounds until you can no longer defend yourself, and the fight is over.  

I'm interested in house-ruling additional fatigue rules for my GURPS game but my players don't want the hassle.

In the past I've been impressed by combat in Rolemaster and Runequest.  GURPS with fatigue, bleeding, and hit locations is okay.

I think the best solution is to code a complicated damage model into a spreadsheet and track the combat with that.  But most TRPGamers hate the idea of a laptop at the game table.

Edit: By the way, you make excellent points about excessive lethality and collapsed timeframe.  Perhaps the answer is "phoenix downs" for the heroes and computer systems to allow ultra-fast rolling.

I like what WW has done in their WoD games. Easy to understand, but not all that abstract.

A very small pool of Hitpoints where each point of damage actually MEANS something. Hit points are determined by a characters stamina (which is applicable in most physical activities).